Saturday, 23 August, 1997 10:20

02:03 on a beautiful night. The ER parking lot is full; we had a fatality MVA (motor vehicle accident) yesterday evening with three or four other people seriously injured, and many of their relatives and friends are here with them.

The quarter-moon is shining its' face toward the invisible sun, still well below the horizon. A line bisecting the lit part of the moon points exactly NorthWest. Someday, I'm gonna try to figger that out... As I smoke my cigarette, I hear the whomp-whomp-whomp of a Huey in the distance. We haven't received word that it was coming here, but we don't know sometimes until they land.

The chopper gets closer and overshoots the hospital, wheeling to the south and briefly obscuring the moon. It continues south, towards the other hospital, not making the familiar U-turn they use to get to our roof. I heave a sigh of relief. They're not bringing me more work...

I rejoice that they have gone to the other place, and I know that the people there rejoice similarly when they do make that U-turn to our roof.

The other place has been hit hard tonight too: the radiologist was tied up over there for three hours, and we had to call in the backup. There are way too many people out tonight celebrating, most of them with alcoholic beverages.

BEEP! Pager goes off. End of cigarette break, end of pointless reflections. Work, work, work.

Friday night/Saturday early morning. Rarely are we not busy, just sometimes in the dead of winter. Trauma, trauma, trauma. It is tiring psychologically, it is tiring physically, it is very sad. Parties end; people head home, never to arrive, or only arriving after a stay in the hospital, traction devices attached to all of their limbs, having a machine breathe for them, fluids going in their arms, running out indwelling urinary catheters.

And these are the lucky ones.

And I am proud to be part of a team that can help them and heal them.

I spent a couple of hours over at Eileenes'; she had a problem with her computer. Her niece had been playing with it and... well, it wouldn't come on. There is an additional power-on button that Eileen never uses, so she had forgotten that it was there. Her niece just looked for the easiest way to turn the machine off... Anyways, since I was there, we deleted a bunch of stuff from her hard disk and got her some room there, and installed a couple of programs.

I just love messing with other people's computers... they have all sorts of neat stuff that you can delete, and ways to tune them up. Makes people happy.

But, after all of that, I'm really dragging. On the way home, I went by the drug store to get a script, and they had Cherry Mashes on sale... so I got $3.00 worth. Just what I need... more chocolate and more sugar. O'well.